Using SHOWNET for OLA with lasers

[Prince Youssoupov]

First post on this mailing list, hi all!

Well, as the title says, I'm here about OLA and SHOWNET [1] in the context of lasers.

I know that SHOWNET is in the OLA codebase [2] but is it known to work? Requiring some tweaks to do so? Part of an obscure zone of the code barely used these days?

Do you have some informations about that? 

For context, I'm a member of a collective which uses a network solution called Etherdream to pilot lasers equiped with an ILDA interface.

Yet etherdream devices are harder and harder to get, so we're looking for other solutions, and SHOWNET seems like a good candidate, yet I failed to find a concrete work of proof.

Cheers

A

[1] "a DMX over IP protocol developed by Strand Lighting. It isn't publicly available but has been reverse engineered" cf. https://wiki.openlighting.org/index.php/Shownet

[2] https://docs.openlighting.org/ola/doc/latest/classola_1_1plugin_1_1shownet_1_1_show_net_device.html

[2] 

[Peter Newman]

Hi,

Firstly I'm probably duty-bound to point out that traditional RS485 based DMX explicitly says in the spec it shouldn't be used for safety critical applications, I'm not sure what if anything the IP based protocols say, but I'm sure you'll bare that in mind.

I believe the ShowNet code certainly would have worked in the past when people developed it. We've got some tests for it which still pass, so we've no reason to think it wouldn't continue to work. I don't think I've personally used it myself. Obviously as with any reverse engineering, and as we're currently working on with KiNet 2, there's always the chance of stuff we've missed, or changes/new features in a newer version we don't support.

Could you give a bit more context though, is there already a ShowNet to laser box available, or are you thinking of making one? If the latter, I'd strongly encourage you to look at E1.31 (Streaming ACN/sACN) instead which is an ANSI standard, or if not that then Art-Net which at least has a much higher take-up than ShowNet, unless there is some feature they are missing which it provides? Also both those have open standards so you can be more confident we've implemented it fully and as intended.

[Jim Ruxton]

It looks to me like Shownet is a piece of hardware that is used to run lasers. It also appears various lighting control signals like ArtNet and DMX can be used to control it so yes OLA will control it but you need the Shownet hardware. https://www.laser-interface.com/en/ . You can probably buy lasers with this hardware already installed.

Jim

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[Peter Newman]

Ah well done Jim!

So the ShowNET Jim links to is not the same as Strand's ShowNet DMX protocol. As he notes, the laser controller can receive ArtNet or traditional RS485 based DMX for control, OLA can generate the former natively and the latter with a suitable dongle/widget attached. We don't know anything/have any support for the ILDA streaming from other ShowNET laser nodes or any other laser specific stuff sorry.

[Prince Youssoupov]

Oh bother. 

Different protocols. Should have figured out. Guess I'm back to hunting alternative DAC hardware solutions, like the opensource/openhardware USB based Helios DAC [1].

As you requested more details, here goes :

Some higher end Laserworld brand's lasers [1] have a built-in an Ethernet port which uses _that_ version of Shownet directly, allowing users to "stream to ILDA".

* DMX allows only to use preset shapes / animations.

* ILDA can can set the [x,y,intensity,color] state of the laser. 

Thus ILDA allows us to create original and reactive light shows based on complex programs (particles simulations, fourier transforms, physics systems).

Anyway, thanks a lot for your quick and very efficient feedback!!!

Cheers

[1] https://github.com/Grix/helios_dac

[2] https://www.laserworld.fr/fr/laserworld-ds/laserworld-ds-2000rgb.html